Two Guys Lose Weight: I want to pig out at Fatburger!

I’ve heard from person after person: it’s not the workout, it’s what you eat.

That wasn’t so true back when I was working on Capitol Hill in the '90s. I could run around Lincoln Park (not the band) for an hour, hork down a lot of garbage (disguised as food) and still lose weight.

As long as I ran. As long as I had plenty of cardio, I could eat whatever I wanted. And I could treat beer like it was food, as my former boss used to say.

That changed over time. A decade later, when I ballooned up to my world record weight of 249, there was no way I could dump the lard even with monstrous "Biggest Loser"-type workouts. Even though I was a cow, I could still do a 10k. But, unlike the earlier experience, the weight stayed on. Sadly, I had to watch my diet.

Even though that’s not going to change, the news from the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal is good. A report says there’s a substantial longer-term benefit after a good workout. Put in a solid 45 minutes and you get a 519-calorie burn. On top of that though, you can lose an extra 190 calories over the next 14 hours.

That’s nice but I would prefer that be 1,900 calories in those 14 hours. But short of acquiring a meth habit, that doesn’t look possible.

Times writer Jeannine Stein equates the extra burn to being able to eat three Pepperidge Farms Milano cookies without impact. Again, that’s nice. But how about a workout that would allow me to pig out at my favorite place: Fatburger.